There are painful life experiences that can be
amplified by suddenness such that there seems to be no hope. The death of
a child or spouse, the loss of a job or imprisonment, or when people
have found themselves unexpectedly refugees from war are just some
examples of these events..

The loss of foundation can create stress in
life that is both unbearable and seemingly hopeless.

As a person grows, he builds upon his
surroundings. This can be his family, school, town, religion, even
philosophy. We often seldom consider how much of what we assume about the
world we live is built upon these assumptions of life. When things happen to
move us from one environment to another, we can find that we lose those
things that gave us certainty and assurance.

A person can even be unaware that he has had
those things upon which he has built his life eroded.

There
are people for whom mental illness or other condition accentuates a
self-focus as well as establishes a social barrier or stigma that
amplifies both isolation and self-preoccupation. Sometimes people will attempt
suicide as a manipulative tool to break down the isolation they feel only
to find people even less inclined to connect with them. People can spend
years considering suicide and finally act to complete what they see as the
only option they have.

Military Suicide

Alien environment

Even if someone never goes into combat,
the military environment can be so different that it can seem like
living on another planet.

Alien culture

Sometimes the strangers you live with
become closer than brothers. Other times these strangers seem to
exclude you or follow a social patterns that you wish to be excluded
from.

Often alcohol and indiscriminate fornication do
not provide enough distraction to make tolerable the transition to a
new life.

Alien oversight

Sometimes a person in the military has a
"boss" for the first time in his life. Sometimes he finds
his first experience working with or for someone who is incompetent,
petty, vengeful, or malicious.

Relating to a machine

Humans are designed to live in families.
The military like much of modern life is an organizational system.
Systems are unable to fill the need humans have for relational
attachment. No matter how many programs and procedures are initiated,
the organizational life will always be alien to humans.

The intentional manipulation of people
to robot-like performance makes people more suited to organizational
systems, but incurs a cost in making people less suited to
relationships.

Between two worlds

Just as the Indians that were taken from
their tribes and raised in white schools were not able to fit into
either world, military experience often creates people who feel
disconnected from the world they knew and unable to find a world where
they can fit in.

Shattered illusions

Sometimes a person will enter the
military in a wave of patriotic enthusiasm. Often the grind of reality
replaces this with cynicism from seeing politicians exploit naiveté
for their own purposes.

You can't go home
again

An author once wrote about the passage
of time that, "You can't go home again". Military experience
accelerates this such that a person is left with a much deeper sense
alienation. This is magnified if there is no replacement
"home".

Alone in the universe

A person who has lost his former
foundation in life can come to see all possible futures as hopeless
and meaningless.

How firm a foundation

As we grow out of childhood,
we bring with us connections with out family, ways of looking at the
world, and a sense of fitting into the world in some way. While we may not
even be aware of these things much less appreciate them, They serve to
give us a foundation to our life.

The transition to an alien life such as
military experience or the encounter of sudden tragedy can expose the
strength or weakness of the foundations upon which we have built our life.

The loss of foundation can be more catastrophic
for a person who was unaware of how much he depended on it.

Family

First and most important foundation

We live in a time when family has been
reduced to both parents working outside the home and children taken
from the home to go to school. "Home" is mostly a place
where four "roommates" reside each going in their own
direction.

There are people for whom even the
truncated family would be a step up. Single parent homes, homes where
there is drug and alcohol abuse, and homes where children are under
constant anxiety can produce even weaker foundations.

Values

What is important

Usually originating in family, values are the
beliefs and ideals that shape how we look at others in relation to
ourselves.

We often value money, easy work, avoiding
consequences, feeling comfortable, and having people admire and
respect us.

Culture

Automatic pilot

Most of us go through our daily life with little
thought about why we do things. We seek to get what we can, do what we
have to, and get out of what we don't want. We are mostly unaware that
our habits that have been accumulated over a lifetime provide a cushion
against reality so that we do not often have to face the discomfort of
truth.

Future

Expectations

We often come to have expectations for our future
based on our assumptions drawn from our family experience, values, and
culture. When anything happens to shake our foundations, we can lose our
hope for the future.

Crumbling foundations frequently result in a
proportional feeling of hopelessness.

How to fix a
foundation

Patch

Reducing pain

People can generally tolerate a large amount of
pain in their lives. When pain gets too great, the most commonly
sought remedy is something to make the pain fall back into the
tolerable level as opposed to fixing something.

Sometimes people divorce or quit their job. Sometimes
people take drugs or alcohol. Sometimes people move to another town.
Often steps taken in the short term can contribute to even greater
pain down the road.

Repair

Identifying the faulty
component

A person may go to medical school, marry and
build a family only to find that his working 80+ hours a week destroys
his family. He may decide that his desire
for money or the personal prestige of being a doctor is not worth the
loss of his family.

Replace

Building a new foundation

Sometimes a person has to dig deeper in his life
to find what is wrong. When many foundational elements have been eroded
or damaged, it can seem an insurmountable task to build something new.

The true foundation

Jesus

Jesus the solid rock

Many people discount Jesus as a
foundation because they feel he is not real.

People fail and die. Banks fail and
close.

Governments go in debt and fail.

The very earth quakes. Storms come.
Drought saps the life from the land.

Wars come. Thieves plunder.

Jesus created the world. He created us.
He died for our sins. He is eternal.

Jesus is more "real" than all
the other things in which we trust.

On Christ the solid Rock I stand,
All other ground is sinking sand;

The suicide advantage

Being
set free

At first it is difficult to think of any
way in which thoughts of suicide could be beneficial. However, frequently
when a person considers suicide, he begins to feel relief and even peace.
Unfortunately this is often mistaken as confirmation of a decision to commit
suicide.

What happens when we begin to mentally detach ourselves
from those thoughts of hopelessness is that we find a freedom not
previously known. If we reach a point where life and death do not matter,
we can find that lesser matters matter even less.

This break in perspective is not a replacement
foundation, but it helps to free us from being dragged down by failing
foundations.

Accepting less than Christ

Churchianity

There was a woman named Glenda who was
going to go home one night and commit suicide. On her way home she picked
up a tract about Jesus and was saved that very evening. At first she
started attending a neighborhood church. She said she went from thinking
she was the only person who had not heard about Jesus to thinking she was
the only one who had.

People who have been set free from the superficial,
trivial, and foolish things of the world have less tolerance for them than
those who incorporate them into their own cherished foundations of life.
As a result, A person who has been to the brink may not find comfort in
traditional and popular Christian church practice. The alternative is to
seek out individual Christians from whom you can learn to be more like
Jesus or to whom you can minister and show the love of Jesus.

Fitting in

A foundation built on Jesus does not mean
finding acceptance in the world. It means the peace that passes
understanding. It means peace in difficulty, strength in adversity, and
certainty of an eternal home with our Savior who loved us so much as to
lay down his life for us.

We see the world as passing away. We see the
foolish, vain, petty, sad, and pathetic things of this world as they are
and find value only in love, truth, wisdom, and all good things which flow
only from him upon whom we have built our foundation.